The
solidarity between Pope Benedict and Cardinal Bertone goes back a long
way and it certainly appears to have continued—at least for the
first few years of Benedict’s papacy—in the time following
the “Message of Fatima” controversy.

After
being elected pope in April, 2005 and taking his place as successor of
John Paul II as Sovereign of the Vatican City State and leader of the
Roman Catholic Church, Ratzinger as “Pope Benedict XVI” quickly
appointed Cardinal Bertone to replace Fatima co-conspirator Angelo Sodano
as the Cardinal Secretary
of State. On April 4, 2007, Benedict also appointed Bertone as his Camerlengo
to administrate the duty of the Pope in the case of a vacancy of the papacy.
Benedict has since made decisions that indicate Bertone could be (or once
was) his choice for successor, and both men have at times appeared to
be stacking and massaging the Red Hats in Bertone’s favor for the
next (final?) conclave. This was noted in the May 13, 2011 National Catholic
Reporter article, “A Triptych on Benedict’s Papacy, and Hints
of What Lies Beyond,” when NCR Senior Correspondent John L. Allen
Jr. spoke of the shake-up inside the Roman Curia (the Curia is the administrative
apparatus of the Vatican and, together with the pope, the central governing
body of the Catholic Church) in which Italian Archbishop Giovanni Angelo
Becciu was appointed the Substitute for General Affairs by Pope Benedict
XVI.

Becciu,
who replaced Archbishop Fernando Filoni for the job, seemed at first an
odd selection to Vatican insiders. “Given how difficult it is to
master the role [of Substitute], many observers found it curious that
Filoni would be shipped out after less than four years, to be replaced
by someone in Becciu who has no previous experience at all working inside
the Vatican,” observed the NCR.[1] But then the nail was hit on
the head when the news service added, “When the dust settles, the
most obvious beneficiary of these moves would seem to be Italian Cardinal
Tarcisio Bertone, the Secretary of State, who will not have to be concerned
about the new substitute forming a rival center of power.”[2] The
job of the Substitute for General Affairs has been described as the most
complicated and demanding responsibility in the Roman Curia due to the
staggering amount of concerns the Substitute must carry on a daily basis.
Roughly compared to a White House Chief of Staff, the Substitute meets
with the Pontiff usually once per day to administer Vatican affairs and
also regularly reports to the Cardinal Secretary of State (currently Cardinal
Bertone). The organizational “success or failure of a papacy often
rests on his shoulders,” adds the NCR. And those who have handled
the office well over the years “have been the stuff of legend: Giovanni
Battista Montini, for instance, was the substitute under Pius XII from
1937 to 1953, and went on to become Pope Paul VI; Giovanni Benelli, who
was Paul’s own substitute from 1967 to 1977, was widely understood
to be the power behind the throne” (emphasis added).[3]

But
if positioning a Vatican novice in the role of Substitute in order not
to challenge future papal possibilities for the Italian Cardinal Bertone
was telling, Pope Benedict even more-so aligned the group-type from which
the next pope will come, when on January 6, 2012 he named twenty-two new
cardinals, most of them Europeans, primarily Italians already holding
key Vatican stations. By elevating these advisors to the Sacred College
of Cardinals at a February 18th ceremony in Rome, the German pope certified
that “Europeans will now number over half of all cardinal-electors
(67 out of 125), and nearly a quarter of all voters in a conclave will
be Italian,” reported Newsmax.com.[4] As a result, Benedict seemed
to put his definitive stamp on an Italian successor and lined up those
who could give Bertone the so-called apostolic chair of Saint Peter. And
evidently this wasn’t Benedict’s idea alone. Most Vatican
experts “put the large number of Italian appointments down to the
influence of the Pope’s deputy, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal
Tarcisio Bertone, whose hand in these nominations, they say, is clearly
visible.”[5]

Also
interesting in lieu of recent reports regarding Pope Benedict’s
health (and news that he might step down in April) was the February timing
of the consistory for the new cardinals to receive their red hats, rings,
and titular assignments in Rome. As we hope to have Petrus Romanus: The
Final Pope Is Here in print by mid April, we can only speculate why the
February date was chosen. Of course the scheduling around the Feast of
the Chair of St. Peter could be cited, but some who work with the pope
had been pushing him for a June (Feasts of St. Peter and Paul) or November
(Feast of Christ the King) consistory, and more often than not Benedict
has held consistories in November (2007 and 2010). So what was the hurry?
If Pope Benedict truly is considering a 2012 departure and wants to significantly
influence the papal conclave toward an Italian, the date and timing in
February made perfect sense as the best and final opportunity to stack
the sacred deck.

Of course,
just when we thought it couldn’t get any more obvious, another—and
this time unprecedented—move to consolidate his power (and which
also raises the question of a third contender for the throne of St. Peter)
was made by Bertone himself. It followed the October 24, 2011, document,
“Toward Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems
in the Context of a Global Public Authority,” which amounted to
a call by the Vatican for a World Political and Financial Authority. Published
by the Pontifical Council
for Justice and Peace, which is headed by Cardinal Peter Turkson, the
media was quick—inside and outside Christianity—to see the
dark side of socialism raising its head, not to mention prophetic implications
of the paper’s call for a Global Authority seated inside the United
Nations. In a chapter of our upcoming book Petrus
Romanus: The Final Pope Is Here we explain how this new unsettling
directive attempts to devise a “moral” mandate for establishing
“a global public authority” and “a central world bank”
that would oversee individual and world pecuniary institutions through
subjugation to a new global power made “at the cost of a gradual,
balanced transfer of a part of each nation’s powers to a world authority
and to regional authorities” (emphasis added).[6] The document was
addressed at the 2011 G20 Summit in Cannes in comments by President Barack
Obama and French President Nicholas Sarkozy, but nothing came of it there
due to what Cardinal Bertone did just ten days later. And this is where
things start getting interesting, as some soothsayers were already predicting
that the author of the document, Peter Turkson of Ghana (Peter the Roman?)
could be the next pope, as he is considered papabile by the College of
Cardinals.

Following
the election of America’s first black president in Obama, analysts
around the world began speculating that perhaps Rome would follow suit
and roll out the red carpet for a black pope, the first in fifteen hundred
years, in somebody like Turkson. Cardinal Francis Arinze, whom Ronald
L. Conte Jr. believes will be the next pope and fulfill “The Prophecy
of the Popes” by taking the name Pius XIII, is also a black man,
an Igbo Nigerian considered papabile since before the 2005 conclave that
elected Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). “The election of
Barack Obama as the first African-American US President could pave the
way for the election of [a] black Pope, according to a leading black American
Catholic,” wrote the Times Online in 2008. “Wilton Daniel
Gregory, 60, the Archbishop of Atlanta, said that in the past Pope Benedict
XVI had himself suggested that the election of a black pontiff would ‘send
a splendid signal to the world’ about the universal Church.”[7]
The Associated Press agreed. “The pope has appointed Cardinal Peter
Turkson of Ghana to head the Vatican’s justice and peace office,
a high-profile post that cements his reputation as a possible future papal
candidate… Turkson told reporters three weeks ago there was no reason
there couldn’t be a black pope, particularly after Barack Obama
was elected U.S. president.”[8] Given that Turkson is popular in
some circles, here is how the National Catholic Reporter heralded the
release of his document on Reforming the International Financial and Monetary
Systems in their October 28, 2011, headline: A Papal Contender Grabs the
Spotlight:

Rome
saw a striking coincidence this week, which could be either simple luck
or a sign of things to come. There were two big-ticket Vatican news
flashes, Monday’s note on reform of the international economy
and Thursday’s summit of religious leaders in Assisi. In both
cases, the same Vatican official was a prime mover: Cardinal Peter Turkson
of Ghana, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

Turkson,
still young in church terms at 63, was the chief organizer of the Assisi
gathering, just as he was the top signatory on the document blasting
“neo-liberal” ideologies and calling for a “true world
political authority” to regulate the economy. During Vatican press
conferences to present both, Turkson was the star attraction each time.

Can
anyone say, papabile?[9]

Only
a week following the National Catholic Reporter celebration, however,
and only ten days after Turkson released his document calling for a global
financial authority, an emergency summit at the Vatican was called by…you
guessed it…the Secretariat of State—Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.
And this time he wasn’t taking any prisoners. Bertone blasted the
document by Turkson and laid down a new set of laws. From that day forward,
he ordered, any new Vatican text would have to be authorized in advance
by himself. The popular Chiesa News in Rome said of the power play:

Precisely
when the G20 summit in Cannes was coming to its weak and uncertain conclusion,
on that same Friday, November 4 at the Vatican, a smaller summit convened
in the secretariat of state… In the hot seat was the [Turkson] document
on the global financial crisis released ten days earlier by the pontifical
council for justice and peace… The secretary of state, Cardinal
Tarcisio Bertone, complained that he had not known about it until the
last moment. And precisely for this reason he had called that meeting
in the secretariat of state. The conclusion of the summit was that this
binding order would be transmitted to all of the offices of the curia:
from that point on, nothing in writing would be released unless it had
been inspected and authorized by the secretariat of state.[10]

While
Bertone convinced some Vatican watchers that his overreaching motives
had to do with protecting the Holy See from confusion by claiming that
he had been in the dark and thus side-swiped by the release of the document
(a case Chiesa News thoroughly debunked), others saw in it another giant
step in Bertone
carefully solidifying his powerbase in Rome. They also imagined that old
enemy the Freemasons having something to do with it. “It would seem
that the dark forces in the Vatican are making their moves to seize control
of the Catholic Church,” wrote Catholic Jew Aron Ben Gilad. “They
are using the recent document of the Pontifical Council of Justice and
Peace on the global financial crisis as the excuse to seize autocratic
control of all the congregations of the curia and putting them under the
control of Cardinal Bertone and the Vatican’s Secretariat of State.
Whatever the merits or demerits of this document is not the important
question, but its use as an instrument for ecclesiastical masonry to take
control of the Roman Curia” (emphasis added).[11] Top Vatican watcher
and journalist Andrea Tornielli had stated as much earlier, documenting
how Bertone had been consolidating his influence in the Vatican:

…through
a number of actions: he appointed bishops who are well known to him and
friends in key roles, especially in positions involving the management
and control of the Holy See’s finances. The last individual appointed,
was the Bishop of Alexandria Giuseppe Versaldinew, to the position of
President of the Prefecture for Economic Affairs of the Holy See…
On the other hand, Bertone has done away with prelates who had moved against
him in some way or another, such as Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò,
who had left the Government office to become Nuncio (ambassador) to the
United States, or Bishop Vincenzo di Mauro, who left the Office of Economic
Affairs to become Archbishop of Vigevano.[12]

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Given
what we have documented in the last few entries, one could think with
some certainty that Bertone is thus a shoo-in for the end-times role of
Petrus Romanus. However, as we move into 2012, cracks are suddenly appearing
in the foundation of his sand castle, and not everybody in the Curia—including
Pope Benedict XVI, himself—may wind up as eager to support him as
they once were. So who else is rising on the radar as contender for the
Final Pope?

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